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6 Responses to It begins.

The top earning 25% of taxpayers in 2006 earned 67.5% of the nation’s income, and yet paid 86% of the tax income the government received. Those are people making around 62 grand a year or more. It includes the rich, but also a fair amount of people you wouldn’t consider “rich,” even though I wouldn’t mind making that much.

The top 1% of taxpayers made 21.2% of the nation’s income, and paid 39.4% of the nation’s taxes. Roughly, this section of the taxpayers paid approximately the same amount as the bottom 95% of taxpayers.

Percentages are a funny way to reckon how much tax comes from where. The people who have the bulk of the wealth in our country have a colossally greater amount of money than the average American. Even if you take a relatively small percentage of their earnings in taxes, it still will account for an unbelievable portion of the overall tax ‘take’.

And frankly, if you make enough money (and if *I* made enough money I would do this) that you could theoretically buy anything you wanted without blinking an eye, then I don’t think you should mind giving a larger portion of that money to people who are less fortunate than yourself. And hey, do it via donations to charitable efforts rather than the tax man, for all I care, and take the deductions. Why not a homeless shelter or a trip to Disneyland for a kid with leukemia instead of a diamond-encrusted Rolex?

I have a friend with enormous net worth, who lives by the following rule: Since he started making more than $500,000 or so a year, he spends 1/3, invests 1/3 and gives 1/3 away. He’s a very happy man, he never worries about money, even when he has a bad year (note the “invest 1/3” portion of the equation) and he does a lot of good for people who need it.

If someone starts giving me $500,000 a year, I promise to live like that. ;)

It’s worth pointing out that the majority of that ultra-high tax bracket *has* to do a significant amount of contributing to charities in order to give as little back in taxes as they do. Percentages are an awkward way to handle it, yes, and I’ll be the first to state that any single person pocketing more than, say, a million a year is pretty fecking ludicrous. But, to go to any person and say “you have to give up 70% of the money you earn each year to income tax” is kind of silly, even if that person, after that 70%, would make far more than the GDP of Botswana per year.

And it’s pretty easy for people to say things like “if I made enough money, I’d give back.” I’m pretty sure everyone who posts here can track back to when they made less money than they do now. And what do we all do when we get that big raise or windfall? We go out and buy something we don’t need. A new house, a new car, a new computer, or even a new DVD, none of that is a necessity (well, maybe sometimes.)

I’ve said many a time before, I’m not entirely sure I could spend a million dollars, let alone the billions that some people make. But I won’t be quoted as saying something like “I’d give it all away,” because I don’t know that I would. I’m willing to admit that I have never had such an exorbitant sum of money, so I will not presume to state what it’d be like to have such a sum. Truly none of us will ever know what we’d do in that situation until we were in it.

However, everyone has the capacity to give something. Why wait to win the lottery in order to give back?